Photos of Ocean Community Mix Grit and Beauty

Sailors James White and Brian Kaltenbach (foreground) help push a stranded car out of a flooded part of Willoughby Spit following a nor'easter.

"Airbrush Frank" Letchworth paints his truck out of a garage in East Ocean View. Though he grew up in the area, he says he's been on the road for 35 years and living in his truck since May. He says Ocean View has "a real diversity" with its million-dollar homes and crackhead prostitutes.

A flock of birds fly over Ocean View Inn while people hang out on the balcony. Many residents who can't afford an apartment pay weekly rates to stay in one of a handful of cheap motels in the area.

Liz Majeskie (center) parties with friends in the Chesapeake Bay in Ocean View on the Fourth of July.

A die-hard fisherman pulls up a catch as Hurricane Earl passes through Ocean View.

Chairs dangle from a storm-ravaged deck.

East Beach resident Jacelyn McCune stands with her dogs Caylie and Chloe. "What are little dogs for except to dress them up?" she laughed.

A few neighbors watch a small parade during Ocean View's National Night Out. The anti-crime event aims to increase awareness and strengthen police programs.

Oysters cook under wet burlap at the Annual Knights of Columbus Oyster Roast.

Sean Bishop, 19, and Ashley Williams, 20, flirt while hanging out at the Ocean View Fishing Pier in Norfolk, Virginia.

"Getting money, fast cash every day is a very addicting lifestyle." It's harder to survive this way, Rapper Tony "Nucklez" LaBella said, but, "if I'm doing music, I can't do anything illegal." For the past nine years he's lived here, mostly in Ocean View, as has his crew of friends. They formed the backdrop of his music video while he filmed outside of Hector's Tire and Rims. At 29 he says he has more insight now than he did hustling on the streets. "I did run with some very notable people out there. Every part in Ocean View is tight. The group that you roll with is your family," he said. "When you cross that bridge on Shore Drive, it's like it's own little city."

A plane flies over as a sailboat lingers on the Chesapeake Bay off Ocean View after the weekly Little Creek sailboat race.

A dive bar encourages people to ride the storm out inside.

William Boyd (left) rests with his fiance, Monique Stevens, after a pickup basketball game in Ocean View. Right on the main drag, squeezed between the Ocean View Senior Center, a bus stop and a demolished beach motel, it's an open space that lures guys from all directions. One man wanders over to play and bums change before leaving.

Bryce Morris, 15, explores the jetty while playing in East Ocean View.

Preston Gannaway’s ongoing project, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, documents the many sides of her ailing, seaside neighborhood of Ocean View in Norfolk, Virginia. Its unique location and history have created a vivid mix of luxury, crime, blue-collar struggles and Americana.

“One of the things that I really like about photography and long-term projects are their ability to recognize complexities,” says Gannaway, a staff photographer at The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk.

Until the end of the ’70s, Ocean View was a destination for tourists all over the Eastern seaboard and sailors from the nearby Navy base. It had a large amusement park with an old wooden rollercoaster, earning the moniker “The Coney Island of the South.”

Then the ’80s hit. Other, more modern amusement parks put the local attraction out of business. Many of the tourists stopped coming, and drugs and crime moved in. Today, Ocean View is home to a variety of working-class communities and still has a rough-and-tumble reputation.

What continues to set the neighborhood apart, however, and what initially drew Gannaway’s attention, is its proximity to the sea — Gannaway’s house and many others sit just yards from the beach.

As a result, many of the residents of Ocean View, people whose lower socioeconomic position would prevent them from being a part of other more upscale seaside communities, still have their own unhindered slice of the natural world.

“It’s really overwhelming how beautiful [the neighborhood] is and how close it is to the sea,” Gannaway says. “There are foxes that live in the bush right by my porch, there are a lot of working ships [in the bay], and you can just sit and watch the storms rolling in. All this is accessible to me and a lot of other people who don’t have a lot of money.”

But the beauty can be fleeting — turn the other direction and you’re back in Ocean View, face to face with the neighborhood and its reputation.

The contrast between these two worlds, that spot right in the middle, is where Gannaway comes in. Her work explores the complexities that exist in a place “that is seemingly so beautiful but also very gritty.”

The name for the project is a saying that was originally used by sailors to mean “between a rock and a hard place” and was made famous by Louis Armstrong as the title of one of his songs. Ocean View’s conflicting nature makes it a fitting title.

For Gannaway, however, the devil in this scenario is not necessarily the crime and poverty. Because the neighborhood is so close to the sea, it’s also become a target for developers who want to turn Ocean View into another luxury community — something that would undoubtedly drive out the working-class communities and ruin the unique ecosystem that now exists.

“What I like about the story is that it can go a lot of different ways,” Gannaway says. “I don’t want to say who the devil is because it depends on how you look at it. You could say the poverty is the devil here, but you could also say it’s the wealth.”

Aesthetically, the photos also refuse to take a clear stance. She’s photographed the neighborhood’s crime, poverty, natural beauty, and incoming wealth with equal attention, flattening all the variables. Paging through the edit it’s difficult to tell where Gannaway stands on the issues.

“The more you dig into the story the more interesting it becomes and the more complexities you discover,” she says.

Throughout the project, methodology has also been key. Gannaway said most of the photos are from feature hunts for her paper and random encounters. She hasn’t set out to tell the story linearly or methodically, but instead lets it come to her. The randomness, she said, helps level the playing field.

Unlike many of the subjects that make the paper, the people in her story “aren’t having the best day of their life or the worst day of their life.”

Gannaway has always chosen to focus intensely on the communities where she lives and works. Her 2008 Pulitzer Prize story Remember Me chronicled a local mother’s fight with cancer and the impact on her family after her death. At the time Gannaway was a photographer for the Concord Monitor and spent two years working on the project.

Now several of the photos in Gannaway’s current story were shot on the deck of her house or on the beach, just steps away.

“Like a novelist who writes about what they know, I shoot what I know,” she says. “You can understand something a lot better if you’re in it.”